Anytime Movies #3: Once Upon a Time in the West

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

Landscapes.

That’s what’s featured in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Whether it’s the vast, aboriginal spaces of Monument Valley—an affectionate genuflection to the films of John Ford—or the intricately chiseled planes of the faces of Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—you spend a lot of time looking at both in Once….—as well as deep close-ups of the faces of Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. There is one shot where Bronson ever so slowly relaxes a smile out of existence. Bronson does it so subtly you don’t know what’s happening until it’s happened. It’s one of the things I look forward to in the Dance of Death of Once Upon a Time in the West. Here are some others:


1. “Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse…” The first twelve minutes. A dilapidated train station in the middle of nowhere. Three long-coated bad-men wait for a train. They while away the time, each in their own unique fashion. Driven mostly by sound and filmed in extreme close-ups, the sequence, accompanied by the homely squeak of a windmill—one of the out-sized sound effects typical of Leone’s westerns—and the jokey placement of the credits, rolls on and on until a confrontation ends explosively. It’s an opening of great economy and intricate film-making. Few words are spoken throughout. I’ve shown students this sequence to show just how much presence and atmosphere simple sound effects can bring to a scene. It’s just the opening gambit in a plot by two men who are playing against each other. It will take the entire movie to explain why.

2. “You Don’t Know How To Play” The gist of Once Upon a Time in the West is a chess game with lives and futures as the playing pieces. As scripted by Sergio Leone and his co-scenarists--the soon to be master of Italian horror films Dario Argento and the young Bernardo Bertolucci--the movie is a series of moves and counter-moves by the antagonists, each one trying to tame the frontier in their own way, and taking their own sweet time about it. Each has to make the pieces fall their way. For the first-time viewer it can be maddening following the strategems of the four participants in the story, but by the end the motivations and loyalties—or lack of them—become clear.
3. “People Scare Easier When They’re Dyin’” The villain of the piece is the meanest, rottenest most conniving scumbag to ever walk a dusty street and spit on it. “Frank” is a sadist who smiles when he kills and for the first time in his life he has a patron with a vision—one big enough for Frank to start to see how there might be such a thing as a future, and that one man can own it. He just can’t understand why people are getting in his way.

4. “Instead of Talking, He Plays. And When He Better Play, He Talks.” The composer and the director did it backwards. Ennio Morricone wrote the music for the film first and Leone built his sequences around the music, playing it on-set to establish mood. There are two spectacular pay-offs--one in the previously mentioned Monument Valley sequence. But the other is at a train station where Claudia Cardinale, has just arrived from New Orleans to find no one to meet her. After a long wait (which is actually mercifully short for a Leone western) she decides to hire passage. Sounds disappear as she is seen through a station window talking to an official, and then the camera HEAVES up and over the roof, and in a burst of music reveals a burgeoning western town full of life and activity. It’s as if all of America is presented in that one astounding crane shot. My wife audibly gasped when she saw the shot in some movie clip program on TV, so stunning is the effect. And more than a little of the power of that shot is due to Morricone’s music and the angelic voice of Edda Dell’Orso, wordlessly cooing an ode to the country and to the protagonist around whom the movie and the future hinges.

5. “Ma’am, It Seems To Me You Ain’t Caught The Idea” For the first time in a Leone western, a woman is the hero, but like her predecessor—"The Man with No Name"—she is flawed and has some learning to do, and it’s up to Leone’s trio of men – another man with no name (going under the aliases of dead men), a wolf-like vagabond-thief, and the villain, Frank—to push, prod, blackmail, challenge and coerce her into a new role. It’s a role each man knows they’ll have no part of, and that, for a time, she is reluctant to fulfill. In the last shot of the film, she is seen bringing water to the railroad work-crew who will be bringing people and prosperity to what will be her town. It may seem a servile role, but as we pull away and follow the disappearing tracks to the frontier, leaving her to her future, she begins to bark orders, to direct and take charge. Her station will become a cornerstone of the push west. “This movie drips with testosterone,” a colleague once told me after a screening. Yes, but Leone includes a healthy shot of estrogen as, for the first time, he is dealing with a story that not only leaves the past behind, but also looks forward to the future.

After his spectacular success with the "Dollars" trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, Leone was given a lot of money, quite a bit of it from Paramount Pictures, to not make his next planned film (based on the novel, "The Hoods" which would eventually become his last film Once Upon a Time in America) but make his next production a western. When he delivered this slow-moving epic on a small scale writ large, the full length film (2 hours, 46 minutes) became a hit in Europe, but Paramount cut what it considered "extraneous" material—a full 25 minutes of it—for its American release.* The film was a bomb in the States. It was released, after all, in 1968, the year of Bullitt, Rosemary's Baby, and 2001: a Space Odyssey. Cinema, and its audience, was changing. The next year Easy Rider would be a huge hit. Once Upon a Time in the West might have seemed a little archaic to the youth audience. Eastwood, a popular star outside of the Leone films by then, wasn't in it. Bronson—popular in Europe, but a supporting actor in America—was. Fonda, Cardinale, and Robards, perfectly cast though they are, did not bring in droves of film-goers.

But, despite its reputation from the box-office performance upon its release in America, the film has developed a cult following here—more than that, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece of film-making, one of the great films of the 20th Century, maybe a little behind-the-times for the box-office, but certainly ahead of its time for the influence it has had on subsequent film-makers.

For me, it is simply beautiful, dusty and hard-scrabble though it is. Some of the images, some of the sequences, run through my head daily, and Morricone's music "ear-worms" into my head once a week. It is still, despite the acolyte-directors who "one-off" the style and sometimes the film, wholly original, while acknowledging its debt to films of the past, presenting them in its own unique way. You'll never see a wide-screen film filled so interestingly as Once Upon a Time in the West. Filled and brimming. Rustic and operatic, Once Upon a Time in the West is a fairy-tale of Myth and History—film history—while making its own.

Claudia Cardinale: The West wrapped around her little finger.

Anytime Movies:

Once Upon a Time in the West

-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

** There had been a precedent: United Artists cut 16 minutes from the nearly 3 hour The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. And Paramount made a worse decision when it eventually released Leone's Once Upon a Time in America: restructuring the director's intricate flashback structure into a chronological narrative, which robbed the movie of its melancholy tone, and removed any mystery the film contained. Curiously, the longer film is fascinating throughout, but Paramount's re-edit seemed interminable. It just shows the differences between a genuine film-maker and studio hacks.

The Professionals

The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) In this post-modern Western (post-A Fistful of Dollars and pre-The Wild Bunch), a ranching tycoon (Ralph Bellamy) hires three soldiers-of-fortune, late of the Mexican Revolution, to rescue his wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale), who has been kidnapped by a Mexican revolutionary-turned-bandit, Jesus Raza (Jack Palance), the ransom being $100,000. The wages are $10,000 per man for a 9 day job. The three are Henry "Rico" Fardan (Lee Marvin), Jake Sharp (Woody Strode) and Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), all with different skill-sets and temperaments, for a job that will require stealth, intricate planning, and an assault on an extremely well-guarded encampment deep in Mexico.

Fardan is a weapons expert, Sharp, a former Apache scout and expert with a bow, silent and precise, while Ehrengard is a horse wrangler, with a regard for his charges, more than he does for human beings. 

There's just one man missing: Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), explosives expert. Fardan wants him for that expertise, but also because he and Dolworth rode with Pancho Villa during the Revolution, alongside Raza. But, sentimentality aside, they've been hired for a job and will ride against their former band-mate, and their history with him may prove valuable in the task. It's a job, pure and simple. It won't remain either.

The four start tracking Raza's gang to get a sense of tactics and escape routes. Dolworth sets up explosives in a particularly tight cliff-pass for their end-game, that can be abetted by a train route, the government transport which they spy Raza's men commandeering, while slaughtering all of the Mexican troops on-board. The small troop of professionals don't interfere and Ehrengard is aghast, but Dolworth explains that those troops were dangerous cut-throats who had been responsible for the destruction of a village, killing Fardan's wife in the process.

But, the train will making a handy means of escape to the mountains after the attack on Raza's encampment, so the four take on Raza's men and take it over. Now, they have a quick way to retreat. But now, the tough part begins: an assault on Raza's stronghold under cover of darkness and try to take Maria back. Ehrengard stays behind with the train while Fardan, Dolworth and Sharp continue the rest of the way, three men against a well-armed fortress.

Raza's place is scouted, the sentries timed, dynamite placed, the two biggest targets being a water tower and a machine-gun placement. For Fardan and Dolworth, it's set and forget, giving them an opportunity to get to the area where Maria is being kept, while Sharp—with arrows tricked up with dynamite—provides cover and distraction. Dolworth has the explosives on timed fuses, so there will be ample explosions to send Raza's men scurrying, with Sharp given the opportunity to improvise.

But, when professionals plan, God laughs. There's always got to be a surprise and The Professionals turns on a single phrase: "We've been had, amigo..." Their mission turns out out to be made on a false premise, and it's then that the four have to make decisions of conscience, for which the time in the revolution has provided ample experience. "Maybe there's only one revolution since the beginning: the good guys versus the bad guys. Trouble is, who are the good guys?" And can good guys do inherently good, even when their job is bad...

Oh, and since they have the woman, they have to find a way to get her back...and stay alive while doing so. It won't be made any easier by the fact that the train they have in waiting has been taken back by Garza's men, who have taken Ehrengard hostage...and they're not interested in any ransom—but maybe a trade will do. Maybe.

Brooks' film (based on Frank O'Rourke's "A Mule for the Marquesa") is a nifty little variation on John Ford's The Searchers, but has nothing to do with that film's underlying motivation of family cohesion and race hatred or hysteria. Here, it's all business that sets the search in motion, not family, and in the course of the film, it happens to turn that film's premise on its ear. Things are done for convenience, things are done for commerce, things are done for compromise. There's no passion here, it's a transaction. But, passion wins out in the end.

It's another of those macho films with a woman at the center of it, and its focus—even when Cardinale's Maria isn't on the screen, the characters are always pondering "What makes a woman worth $100,000?" It finally succumbs to a rough-hided romanticism, as if any of the characters would admit to it (which they wouldn't as their credo is usually demonstrated by actions and not words) that might be revolutionary echoes or merely respect. The dialog does get a little too philosophical in intent, but it does have one heck of a clever come-back at the end. And it's an entertaining ride.

There'll be another of the Western genre's "Searchers spin-off's" next week.

Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco and His Brothers aka "Rocco e i suo fratelli" (Luchino Visconti, 1960) The Parondi family moves up to Northern Italy from the country and they find simultaneous success and tragedy in the city.

 

It's the immigrant's story: they move to make a better life and the choices they make are wholly determined by their conditions. The widow Parondi (Katina Paxinou) moves her brood to Milano, where eldest son Vincenzo (Spiros Focás) is guest of honor at an engagement party for his intended, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale). The family swoops in and North/South prejudices erupt and break up the party. The worst news for Vincenzo is that, as eldest, he has to provide for them and arranges a short term rental that he plans to break the lease on, so they can then be kicked out and depend on government housing. From there, the brothers must find work and make a life for themselves.

But it's tough to be a saint in the city. The film is divided into chapters for each brother, starting with Vincenzo, then the mercurial Simone (Renato Salvatori), good-hearted Rocco (Alain Delon), practical Ciro (Max Cartier) and the innocent Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi) who looks up to them all. Simone and Rocco take the fast money way out, going into the traditional immigrant sport—boxing—and its underworld of shady characters, Ciro gets an auto-workers job, while Vince ignores his mother's objections, marries Ginetta and moves out. Each brother, in turn, finds their escape from family, even Rocco whose mission seems to be to keep the family intact. The brothers are wholly unprepared for the city and their separate ways of dealing leads to internal conflict and strife, with the women in their lives often being the ones chewed up in their machinations.

It's not just the 3-hour length and terrific Nino Rota score that suggest it, but you look at Visconti's direction of Rocco and His Brothers and you see the playbook Francis Ford Coppola used for The Godfather: the half-lit sets, the faces emerging from darkness, the "communal" shots where a lot happens in long takes of activity, the simultaneous staging of triumph and tragedy, and the bursts of violence communicated with a minute pre-echo of dread. That Rocco matches so many of The Godfather's themes—the passing of old traditions in modern times, the splintering of the family, the immigrant's plight, and the futility of good intentions—one can see how film-buff Coppola was inspired to make a silk purse out of Mario Puzo's best-selling sow's ear.

The Leopard

The Leopard aka Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Epic.

Extraordinarily epic.

Exquisite three hour film (that is, if you watch the original Italian, rather than the edited, dubbed American version*) of the change-over from one generation of Italian artistocracy to one with fewer ties to the past, amidst a changing landscape that will ultimately change fortunes. Don Salina (Burt Lancaster) is a prince of the old lineage observing the change that will ultimately overthrow the government and his rights to power, even as he sees the old ways and traditions begin to erode in the rise of his nephew Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon) who chooses to marry below his station to the manipulative Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). In one of the many allusions to the animal kingdom, Don Salina fears that his generation of leopards is being handed over to jackals.

In its timeline and its scope, it could be labeled the Italian Gone With the Wind. Certainly the care and attention to detail that director Visconti, Director of Photography Giuseppe Rotunno, and Production Designer Mario Garbuglia brought to bare can be compared to the extravagance of the American epic. But it's a smarter, richer film—a far better film—with layered subtleties that GWTW never aspired to.

Visconti had a special affinity for the material. Like the author of the original novel, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the director was born to the aristocracy. He knew its joys and pleasures and tastes, and he follows Lampedusa's celebration of that life in its recognition. But Visconti became a Marxist, so he looks at the excesses and hypocrises with less sentiment than Lampedusa does. But, he also acknowledges that change ultimately doesn't change much where fortunes are involved.

Contained here are some of the beautiful images that Visconti, Rotunno, and Garbuglia composed, rich in color and detail like fine paintings. But they're in motion and filled with life and portent and commentary.
I've seen The Leopard only once. Its beauties compel further viewings with which more of the complexities of the work will become apparent. One can't wait to get started.

Films like The Leopard are why one falls in love with the medium in the first place.

* Sydney Pollack supervised the dubbed version, and even he acknowledged it hurt the movie. One of the odd things about it is Lancaster's performance: He's actually better dubbed in Italian with a different, gruffer voice, rather than the soft, smokey baritone of his own voice. In fact, the combination of Lancaster's screen-work and substituted voice combine to make the greatest performance he never gave!

Anytime Movies (Transplanted): Once Upon a Time in the West

While I have a few reviews "in the works," It's as good a time as any to re-boot (actually transplant from the old movie blog) a feature I started years ago, when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List. 

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin. 

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies. 

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

Landscapes.

That’s what’s featured in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Whether it’s the vast, aboriginal spaces of Monument Valley—an affectionate genuflection to the films of John Ford—or the intricately chiseled planes of the faces of Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda—you spend a lot of time looking at both in Once….—as well as deep close-ups of the faces of Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale. There is one shot where Bronson ever so slowly relaxes a smile out of existence. Bronson does it so subtly you don’t know what’s happening until it’s happened. It’s one of the things I look forward to in the Dance of Death of Once Upon a Time in the West. Here are some others:


1. “Looks Like We’re Shy One Horse…” The first twelve minutes. A dilapidated train station in the middle of nowhere. Three long-coated bad-men wait for a train. They while away the time, each in their own unique fashion. Driven mostly by sound and filmed in extreme close-ups, the sequence, accompanied by the homely squeak of a windmill—one of the out-sized sound effects typical of Leone’s westerns—and the jokey placement of the credits, rolls on and on until a confrontation ends explosively. It’s an opening of great economy and intricate film-making. Few words are spoken throughout. I’ve shown students this sequence to show just how much presence and atmosphere simple sound effects can bring to a scene. It’s just the opening gambit in a plot by two men who are playing against each other. It will take the entire movie to explain why.

2. “You Don’t Know How To Play” The gist of Once Upon a Time in the West is a chess game with lives and futures as the playing pieces. As scripted by Sergio Leone and his co-scenarists--the soon to be master of Italian horror films Dario Argento and the young Bernardo Bertolucci--the movie is a series of moves and counter-moves by the antagonists, each one trying to tame the frontier in their own way, and taking their own sweet time about it. Each has to make the pieces fall their way. For the first-time viewer it can be maddening following the strategems of the four participants in the story, but by the end the motivations and loyalties—or lack of them—become clear.
3. “People Scare Easier When They’re Dyin’” The villain of the piece is the meanest, rottenest most conniving scumbag to ever walk a dusty street and spit on it. “Frank” is a sadist who smiles when he kills and for the first time in his life he has a patron with a vision—one big enough for Frank to start to see how there might be such a thing as a future, and that one man can own it. He just can’t understand why people are getting in his way.

4. “Instead of Talking, He Plays. And When He Better Play, He Talks.” The composer and the director did it backwards. Ennio Morricone wrote the music for the film first and Leone built his sequences around the music, playing it on-set to establish mood. There are two spectacular pay-offs--one in the previously mentioned Monument Valley sequence. But the other is at a train station where Claudia Cardinale, has just arrived from New Orleans to find no one to meet her. After a long wait (which is actually mercifully short for a Leone western) she decides to hire passage. Sounds disappear as she is seen through a station window talking to an official, and then the camera HEAVES up and over the roof, and in a burst of music reveals a burgeoning western town full of life and activity. It’s as if all of America is presented in that one astounding crane shot. My wife audibly gasped when she saw the shot in some movie clip program on TV, so stunning is the effect. And more than a little of the power of that shot is due to Morricone’s music and the angelic voice of Edda Dell’Orso, wordlessly cooing an ode to the country and to the protagonist around whom the movie and the future hinges.

5. “Ma’am, It Seems To Me You Ain’t Caught The Idea” For the first time in a Leone western, a woman is the hero, but like her predecessor—"The Man with No Name"—she is flawed and has some learning to do, and it’s up to Leone’s trio of men – another man with no name (going under the aliases of dead men), a wolf-like vagabond-thief, and the villain, Frank—to push, prod, blackmail, challenge and coerce her into a new role. It’s a role each man knows they’ll have no part of, and that, for a time, she is reluctant to fulfill. In the last shot of the film, she is seen bringing water to the railroad work-crew who will be bringing people and prosperity to what will be her town. It may seem a servile role, but as we pull away and follow the disappearing tracks to the frontier, leaving her to her future, she begins to bark orders, to direct and take charge. Her station will become a cornerstone of the push west. “This movie drips with testosterone,” a colleague once told me after a screening. Yes, but Leone includes a healthy shot of estrogen as, for the first time, he is dealing with a story that not only leaves the past behind, but also looks forward to the future.

After his spectacular success with the "Dollars" trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, Leone was given a lot of money, quite a bit of it from Paramount Pictures, to not make his next planned film (based on the novel, "The Hoods" which would eventually become his last film Once Upon a Time in America) but make his next production a western. When he delivered this slow-moving epic on a small scale writ large, the full length film (2 hours, 46 minutes) became a hit in Europe, but Paramount cut what it considered "extraneous" material—a full 25 minutes of it—for its American release.* The film was a bomb in the States.  It was released, after all, in 1968, the year of Bullitt, Rosemary's Baby, and 2001: a Space Odyssey. Cinema, and its audience, was changing. The next year Easy Rider would be a huge hit. Once Upon a Time in the West might have seemed a little archaic to the youth audience. Eastwood, a popular star outside of the Leone films by then, wasn't in it. Bronson—popular in Europe, but a supporting actor in America—was. Fonda, Cardinale, and Robards, perfectly cast though they are, did not bring in droves of film-goers.

But, despite its reputation from the box-office performance upon its release in America, the film has developed a cult following here—more than that, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece of film-making, one of the great films of the 20th Century, maybe a little behind-the-times for the box-office, but certainly ahead of its time for the influence it has had on subsequent film-makers.

For me, it is simply beautiful, dusty and hard-scrabble though it is. Some of the images, some of the sequences, run through my head daily, and Morricone's music "ear-worms" into my head once a week. It is still, despite the acolyte-directors who "one-off" the style and sometimes the film, wholly original, while acknowledging its debt to films of the past, presenting them in its own unique way. You'll never see a wide-screen film filled so interestingly as Once Upon a Time in the West. Filled and brimming. Rustic and operatic, Once Upon a Time in the West is a fairy-tale of Myth and History—film history—while making its own.

Claudia Cardinale: The West wrapped around her little finger.

-Only Angels Have Wings
The Searchers
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Chinatown
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* There had been a precedent: United Artists cut 16 minutes from the nearly 3 hour The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. And Paramount made a worse decision when it eventually released Leone's Once Upon a Time in America: restructuring the director's intricate flashback structure into a chronological narrative, which robbed the movie of its melancholy tone, and removed any mystery the film contained. Curiously, the longer film is fascinating throughout, but Paramount's re-edit seemed interminable. It just shows the differences between a genuine film-maker and studio hacks.